Performing Arts: Year In Review 2004

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
provides an overview of the year’s most-notable people and events.
Unlike most articles on Britannica.com, Book of the Year articles are not reviewed and revised after their initial publication.
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Classical Music

One of the hallmarks of Western classical music is its sheer resilience, its ability to renew and refresh itself as an art form even as its core repertoire continues to speak—over years, decades, and centuries—to the soul and intellect of humankind. This resilience is manifest in many ways, many of which were illustrated in the year 2004 in classical music.

In the spring, while scholars were preparing the art exhibit Botticelli and Filippino: Grace and Passion in 15th Century Florentine Painting in Florence, a music specialist from the University of Toronto noticed that the notes on a scroll in Filippino Lippi’s painting Madonna and Child with Singing Angels corresponded to an actual Renaissance song. When that song was transcribed and performed at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi at the start of the exhibit, it marked the first time that “Fortuna desperata” had been heard in 500 years. In January, Ottorino Respighi’s opera Marie Victoire, which was written before World War I, received its world premiere at the Rome Opera House. When it was presented in October in Essen, Ger., Felix Mendelssohn’s comic opera The Uncle from Boston was heard for the first time since the composer created it in 1823, at age 14. A four-minute work for organ, Voluntary on Tallis’s Lamentations, written by Benjamin Britten in 1940, debuted at the London Proms; and a 40-second piece by Edward Elgar, Smoking Cantata, received its world premiere in a broadcast by the BBC Radio 4 program Today. These pieces had been discovered in various European archives in recent years. Other works that had been seemingly lost to the world were similarly recovered, including a wedding cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been missing for 80 years, and the manuscript of Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, which had disappeared shortly after the composer wrote it in 1908.

Even as older pieces were being reborn, new works were being heard for the first time. Following the success of his first opera, Dead Man Walking, in 2000, composer Jake Heggie unveiled his next, The End of the Affair, at the Houston (Texas) Grand Opera in March. Other operas receiving premieres included Ishmael Wallace’s The Stranger, Grigori Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank, and William Bolcom’s A Wedding; the last made its debut as part of the commemorations of the 50th anniversary season of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Fittingly, given the subject, in Jon Gibson’s opera Violet Fire, based on the life of magnetism-and-electricity mastermind Nikola Tesla, performers were wired with microphones, and the energy waves from their bodies were picked up and telecast onto an onstage video screen during the debut in February.

New instrumental works were also presented for the first time, among them Elliott Carter’s Dialogues (which the composer described as “a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra”), George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 3, and Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird. Even as these and other new works were appearing, announcements were being made about works that loomed tantalizingly on the horizon. British composer John Tavener, whose pieces traditionally drew heavily from his Russian Orthodox faith, told the media that in 2005 he would premiere a new choral work based on the 99 names for God in Islam. The first complete performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour-long Licht operatic cycle was scheduled to be presented in 2008 in a €10 million (about $13.3 million) production.

In a unique attempt to keep new pieces in the repertoire, conductor Sir Simon Rattle announced that he would be the patron of the Encore project, in which works that had recently received their premieres but had since gone unperformed would be revisited by London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra over the next four years. Not content only to reinvigorate newer works, Rattle offered a singular slant on one of the warhorses of the classical repertoire, Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 watershed work Le Sacre du printemps, by adding surrealistic visuals to his performance of the piece at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The English National Opera announced that it had commissioned the Asian Dub Foundation, a group of pop-electronica artists, to write an opera about Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, which would debut in 2006. Meanwhile, in Halberstadt, Ger., an intrepid group of musicians added two notes to their performance of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (ASLSP being an abbreviation of Cage’s instruction that performance of the piece be “as slow as possible”), which was scheduled to continue on a semiannual basis for the next 639 years (in the performance’s next installment, in March 2006, two notes were to be subtracted).

Various musical milestones were also marked and celebrated in 2004. In March Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, arguably the most famous classical music artist of his generation, gave his final performance on the operatic stage in a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. At the end of that performance, Pavarotti’s 379th with the company, the sold-out audience gave him an 11-minute standing ovation. In February the Met’s general manager, Joseph Volpe, announced his retirement from the company that he had led for 40 years; his successor, record executive Peter Gelb, was named later in the year. Without relinquishing his post as the Met’s music director, conductor James Levine raised his baton at a concert in October as the first U.S.-born music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. On December 7 Milan’s newly renovated La Scala had a gala reopening with a production of Antonio Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta, which had not been performed since it was commissioned for the opera house’s original opening in 1778.

The London Symphony Orchestra celebrated its 100th season, while Chicago enjoyed two 100-year commemorations—of Orchestra Hall, the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and of the Ravinia Festival, for which the New York Philharmonic gave a special performance. The original members of the Guarneri String Quartet reunited for a tour that marked the ensemble’s 40th anniversary. Conductor Gerard Schwarz was honoured for his 20th anniversary with the Seattle (Wash.) Symphony Orchestra, and Kent Nagano was offered accolades for his 25th year at the helm of the Berkeley (Calif.) Symphony Orchestra. Seiji Ozawa, for 29 years, until 2002, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, returned from his post at the Vienna State Opera to the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts to take part in a performance marking the 10th anniversary of the concert hall that was named for him. Composer Antonin Dvorak was honoured by orchestras around the world on the centenary of his death.

One of Dvorak’s contemporaries, Gustav Mahler, figured prominently in the classical music categories at the year’s Grammy Awards. Recordings of his Symphony No. 3 won separate Grammys for best classical album (by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony) and best orchestral performance (by Pierre Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic). At the same ceremony, iconic American pianist Van Cliburn was honoured with an award for lifetime achievement. New Tonalist composer Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy—based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest—won the Pulitzer Prize for music, while film composer John Williams and diva Joan Sutherland were among the recipients of the year’s Kennedy Center Honors presented by Pres. George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush at the White House in December. In October Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena was named artist of the year at the 27th annual Gramophone Awards in London. The young Chinese piano sensation Lang Lang (seeBiographies) was named a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in May.

Other milestones of a sadder sort occurred as well. The world of film and musicals lost Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith in July, Elmer Bernstein and David Raksin in August, and lyricist Fred Ebb in September; among conductors, Iona Brown died in June, Carlos Kleiber passed in July, and Hans Vonk was taken by Lou Gehrig’s disease in August; Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi died in December; French baritone Gérard Souzay died in August, and American baritone Robert Merrill succumbed in October (a loss for the world of baseball as well as opera, as Merrill sang the national anthem on opening day at Yankee Stadium every year); Indian sitar player and composer Vilayat Hussein Khan died in March; and the Israeli composer Naomi Sapir Shemer, who wrote inspirational and art songs, died in June.

The year was not without other moments that ranged from the eccentric and frivolous to the downright comic. Bugs Bunny turned up on a video screen at a concert in August to “conduct” the Cleveland (Ohio) Orchestra in a program that included such classical favourites as What’s Opera, Doc? and The Rabbit of Seville. The concert, dubbed Bugs Bunny on Broadway, drew the largest audience of the orchestra’s summer season. String players of the Bonn (Ger.) Beethoven Orchestra were not kidding, however, when they sued the orchestra in March. The musicians maintained that the string players had more notes to play than their counterparts on other instruments and that they therefore deserved a pay raise. There was, as usual, the yearly controversy at the Bayreuth Festival in Bavaria. This time it involved a dispute between Christoph Schlingensief, who was directing a production of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, which was booed by the opening-night audience, and his leading tenor, Endrik Wottrich. The former charged that the latter was a racist because he allegedly objected to having black singers in the cast; Wottrich responded by calling Schlingensief a “Nazi.” Diva Elisabeth Schwarzkopf went both of them one better (or worse), however, by admitting that she had been a member of the Nazi Party during the Hitler era. In her memoirs, Les Autres Soirs, published in July, Schwarzkopf wrote that she joined the party in the 1930s as “a strictly administrative gesture.”

A documentary that debuted in September speculated that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the legendarily foul-mouthed and uncouth musical genius, might have suffered from Tourette syndrome, an inherited neurological disorder that can cause involuntary grunting and other vocal tics as well as a compulsion to utter obscenities. Scientists in Salzburg, Austria, began the process of unearthing the bodies of Mozart’s father, maternal grandmother, and niece to glean DNA samples that might prove that a skull at the city’s International Mozarteum Foundation was that of the composer himself.

Great Britain, however, was the stage for the year’s most celebrated musical flap. In March world-renowned American soprano Deborah Voigt was dropped from an English National Opera production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos because her girth was deemed too substantial to fit into one of the costumes. Wags weighed in with all manner of bad jokes, of course, but the incident also raised serious artistic questions, such as whether operatic heroines necessarily had to be fashion-model svelte.

Their foibles notwithstanding, the music makers of 2004 outdid themselves with the music they made. The year included a wealth of recordings that brought new life to a wide range of works. Nagano led a force of 200 performers in an incisive recording of Leonard Bernstein’s stylistically sprawling Mass (Harmonia Mundi), while Ozawa offered elegant readings of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony and Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (RCA).

Nikolaus Harnoncourt revealed new aspects of the young Mozart’s budding genius in his set of the composer’s Mozart: Early Symphonies (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi), and violinist Nigel Kennedy displayed his impassioned virtuosity on Vivaldi II (EMI). Two recordings released by RCA provided new insights into two of the greatest masters. A new addition to the label’s reDiscovered series featured recordings that the 19-year-old Itzhak Perlman had made for his debut record in 1965. The recordings, which were shelved at the time, were finally released in 2004. They documented the intensity and abandon of the young violinist at the start of his illustrious career. The fabled voice of tenor Enrico Caruso finally received the orchestral accompaniment it was originally denied on gramophone recordings, owing to technological limitations in the early 20th century. On Caruso: amor ti vieta: Great Opera Arias, the original recordings with piano accompaniment were augmented by a modern orchestra, and 21st-century listeners were thereby allowed to hear Caruso as his contemporaries had in the concert halls of his day. These recordings, like so much else that came to life—or back to life—in 2004, captured the timelessness not only of the music itself but also of those who served it.

Jazz

The deaths of Ray Charles, Malachi Favors, Elvin Jones, and Steve Lacy left the jazz world reeling in 2004. The most popular of jazz artists, usually accompanied by large and small bands of top musicians, Charles soloed on piano and organ in instrumental albums; more famed as the most distinctive of singers, he crossed pop-music borders with rare swinging freedom and originality. The losses of the other three men were felt especially keenly because they were crucial figures in the evolution of the jazz avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s. The passionate drummer Jones, the lyric soprano saxophone explorer Lacy, and the uniquely sensitive yet potent bassist Favors offered shattering innovations that exerted major influences on the jazz idiom.

Despite obviously failing health, Jones, whose polyrhythms had ignited a revolution in jazz percussion, insisted on leading groups in clubs and concerts almost to the end of his life. Lacy, who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, while suffering from cancer, performed settings of poems by Beat Generation poets in 2004, when he also debuted his Monksieland band. Monksieland was an experimental quintet in which Lacy, trumpeter Dave Douglas, trombonist Roswell Rudd, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer John Betsch interpreted Thelonious Monk songs in a new Dixieland-influenced collective-improvisational manner.

The loss of Favors, the senior musician among these three, might have been most painful. He was the heartbeat of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which had stayed together for more than three decades. The 1999 death of trumpeter Lester Bowie was devastating to the Art Ensemble; three original members—Favors, saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, and drummer Famoudou Don Moye—persisted, and in 2003 saxophonist Joseph Jarman returned. It was Favors, however, who was essential to their singular, shared perceptions of musical form, line, and colour; after bassist Jaribu Shahid replaced him, the group added trumpeter Corey Wilkes and percussionist Baba Sissoko and struggled to forge a new Art Ensemble style.

This new Art Ensemble of Chicago toured Europe and played at Iridium, the Broadway nightclub where Cecil Taylor presented his Orchestra Humaine in March. It was a rare appearance for this fiery big band, which improvised wildly on suites of Taylor themes; the occasion was the pianist-leader’s 75th birthday. Henry Grimes, an important bassist of the 1960s who had emerged from decades of self-imposed obscurity in 2003, advanced his second jazz career with European tours and appearances at New York’s Vision Festival. At the same festival, the Revolutionary Ensemble ended its 27-year retirement; this pioneering violin-bass-drums trio also debuted a CD, And Now … (Pi), and had its rarest album, The Psyche (Mutable Music), reissued in 2004.

Among other highlights, nearly two million people flocked to the 25th Montreal Jazz Festival, which concluded with a performance by Cirque de Soliel. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis led the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at the grand opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center, possibly the grandest jazz spa of all. Located on New York City’s Columbus Circle, it included a main hall with more than 1,000 seats, a smaller theatre with 420–500 seats, and a nightclub named Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, where the Dizzy Gillespie Festival was held in the autumn. Two nights before the opening, PBS broadcast its Live from Lincoln Center television show from the new building. Meanwhile, trumpeter Jon Faddis, who had led the now-defunct Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, was named director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, based at that city’s Columbia College. The Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, a project with some 55 players, played compositions by yet another trumpeter-leader, Orbert Davis, in its premiere performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival.

The Chicago festival also introduced American audiences to Ten Part Invention, drummer John Pochee’s all-star 10-piece Australian band, which featured compositions by noted saxophonist Sandy Evans. A 10-piece all-star British jazz band led by another drummer, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, offered the album Watts at Scott’s. Meanwhile, in reaction to the U.S.-led Iraq war and the administration of Pres. George W. Bush, Charlie Haden unveiled his new Liberation Music Orchestra, with scores by Carla Bley; “We play for peace,” stated Haden, who had led previous LMOs during the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War. Colourist composer Maria Schneider bypassed the ongoing crisis in the recording industry by selling her orchestra album Concert in the Garden only on the Internet; she was the most prominent of the jazz artists signed to ArtistShare.com.

Two important essay collections, Jazz in Search of Itself by Larry Kart and Living with Jazz by Dan Morgenstern, were published in 2004. Among other new recordings were pianist Marilyn Crispell’s Storyteller and singer Diana Krall’s The Girl in the Other Room, with songs composed by herself and husband Elvis Costello. Quite the most extraordinary of the year’s recording projects was Holy Ghost, a heavy box of 10 CDs culled from private and broadcast recordings from 1962–70 by the tragic revolutionary tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler. The box included a book of commentary, reproductions of posters from the period, writings by Ayler, and a pressed flower.

The Kabell Years: 1971–1979 collected valuable solo trumpet and ensemble works by Wadada Leo Smith. All Music by Warne Marsh, All-Star Swing Sessions by Bud Freeman, and a boxed set, The Complete Roy Eldridge Verve Studio Sessions, were some of the year’s other outstanding reissues. The jazz world also mourned the loss of clarinetist Artie Shaw, tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, and guitarist Barney Kessel. Other deaths during the year were those of violinist-guitarist Claude Williams and drummer Walter Perkins.

Popular

International

The year 2004 was brimming with music from the arid wasteland of the Sahara in North Africa. The most intriguing release came from Tinariwen, a band from northern Mali that had learned to play while exiled in the refugee camps of Libya at a time when the Tuareg people were in armed revolt against the Malian government. Tinariwen claimed that at least one member of the band had gone into battle with a guitar on one shoulder and an AK-47 on the other. With the war over, the group returned home and became global stars. Their much-praised album Amassakoul was based on slinky, bluesy guitar riffs with an Arabic edge, along with a dash of reggae, chanting vocals, and even a demonstration of Malian toasting and rap. Onstage they wore long desert robes, and for one of their more memorable concerts during the year, they were joined onstage in London by Taj Mahal, the veteran American blues guitarist, for a rousing display of the links between African styles and the blues.

It was also a good year for artists from Algeria. Rachid Taha argued that there were also links between North African styles and rock, and his album Tekitoi mixed North African influences with an attack worthy of the punk era. The standout track “Rock el Casbah” was a reworking of the Clash song “Rock the Casbah”; this time the wailing desert flutes were mixed with guitar riffs. Khaled, one of the best-selling artists across the Arabic-speaking world, took a very different approach with his album Ya-Rayi. In the past he had mixed rai, an Arabic pop music, with anything from hip-hop to funk and reggae, but in his new album he produced a lighter set, influenced by his early days in Algeria; Khaled incorporated the oud (a stringed instrument) and his own work on mandolin and accordion, along with an Egyptian string section.

Egyptian musicians—famous across North Africa—were much in demand. Youssou N’Dour of Senegal produced a highly experimental album, Egypt, in which he moved away from the local mbalax dance styles and pop ballads to record music in praise of Islam and to explore the musical links between Senegal and Egypt. The result was an album of swirling Egyptian strings, drums, and flutes that was matched against his distinctive, powerful vocals.

There was more such experimental fusion work from Latin America, where two of the best new albums came from female Mexican singers who incorporated influences from north of the border. Mexican American Lhasa de Sela (known simply as Lhasa) released The Living Road, an unusual, compelling set of songs that made use of anything from Mexican dance themes to European balladry. Lhasa made her home in Quebec and sang in Spanish, French, and English. Lila Downs, another singer and songwriter of both Mexican and American parentage, produced Una Sangre, which mixed Mexican influences with jazz and American folk-blues and included a remarkably fresh reworking of the well-worn favourite “La Bamba.”

From Europe there was more interesting fusion work from Spanish singer Amparo Sánchez, leader of the band Amparanoia. Her album Rebeldia con alegria mixed Cuban rhythms with songs by her friend Manu Chao and cheerful political anthems. If the sassy Sánchez shook up Spanish music, then the veteran Enzo Avitabile did the same for Italy. His latest venture involved a percussion section bashing away at enormous wine barrels—a tradition that dated back to medieval times. The sound was extraordinary, and on his album Save the World he persuaded African musicians, including Khaled, to participate.

In Great Britain the much-praised teenage soul star Joss Stone topped the album charts with Mind Body and Soul, but at the prestigious Mercury Music Prize awards, she was beaten by Glaswegian guitar band Franz Ferdinand. The Kinks’ songwriter Ray Davies was shot by a mugger in New Orleans but recovered to give a series of rousing concerts celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Kinks’ song “You Really Got Me”—which again became a best seller. Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue (seeBiographies), who was also a favourite in Britain, won her first Grammy, for best dance recording, with “Come into My World.”

Among the deaths during the year were those of Colombian drummer Batata, Jamaican record producer and entrepreneur Coxsone Dodd, and French singer Claude Nougaro.

United States

In the U.S., urban acts OutKast (seeBiographies) and Alicia Keys began 2004 atop the pop charts, but Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl halftime show on February 1 soon overshadowed all things musical. During a nationally televised dual performance, Justin Timberlake popped off a portion of Jackson’s corset, exposing most of her breast and igniting a controversy that generated a half million complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC fined CBS $550,000, and Viacom Inc., the owner of CBS, protested the fine.

The Grammy Awards took place one week after the Super Bowl, and the show aired with a five-minute delay (to prevent another televised mishap). Jackson’s planned appearance was scrapped owing to the controversy, but Timberlake was allowed to appear (he won two awards). The night’s big winner was singer Beyoncé (seeBiographies), who notched five Grammys. OutKast’s double CD Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won album of the year in a further underscoring of hip-hop’s place in the American mainstream. Beyoncé and OutKast also won multiple awards in August at the Billboard/AURN R&B/Hip-Hop Awards, though R. Kelly’s seven trophies topped their totals. At September’s Latin Grammy Awards, Spain’s Alejandro Sanz won four awards, including best album honours for No es lo mismo.

Genre lines blurred in several instances in 2004. Smokie Norful, Vickie Winans, CeCe Winans, and other gospel artists found their way onto Billboard’s mainstream R&B chart, and hip-hop artist Kanye West released an explicitly Christian single, “Jesus Walks,” that reached Billboard’s all-genre Top 20. More blurring occurred when St. Louis, Mo.-based rapper Nelly recruited country superstar Tim McGraw for vocal assistance on “Over and Over,” a track from Nelly’s Suit album. With his appearance on “Over and Over,” McGraw became the first country artist to appear on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles chart.

McGraw’s Live like You Were Dying album sold 766,000 copies during its first week, and his “Live like You Were Dying” single topped Billboard’s country chart for seven weeks. Other major country-music stories included the revival of country sales, with a double-digit increase over 2003; Gretchen Wilson’s Here for the Party, which recorded the largest first-week sales (227,000) for a debut album in country history; and Kenny Chesney’s top entertainer and album prizes at the Country Music Association Awards in November.

With a November presidential election that pitted incumbent Pres. George W. Bush against Democratic challenger John Kerry, numerous music figures involved themselves in politics. Hip-hop magnate Sean (“P. Diddy”) Combs’s Citizen Change group sought to register urban youth to vote through its “Vote or Die!” campaign. Rock icon Bruce Springsteen made several campaign appearances with Kerry and was among the artists who embarked on a “Vote for Change” tour in October. Eminem used the Internet to release the anti-Bush single “Mosh.”

Satellite radio continued to surge forward as competitors Sirius and XM reeled in subscribers to their multichannel services. At year’s end XM had more than 2.5 million users. (SeeMedia and Publishing: Radio: Sidebar.) Another trend favoured cellular phone “ringtones”; people paid several dollars to download a song that would play when triggered by an incoming phone call. In November Billboard initiated a ringtone chart, topped first by Usher and Alicia Keys’s “My Boo.”

In February industry mogul Clive Davis took over as chairman and CEO of BMG North America. In July the Federal Trade Commission approved a merger between BMG Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment. With the merger 80% of recorded music was owned by four companies, and the newly created Sony BMG became the second largest music company in the world (behind Universal Music Group).

The year ended with major acts—including Eminem, vocal group Destiny’s Child, pop artist Gwen Stefani, Southern hip-hop force Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, rapper Snoop Dogg, and Irish band U2—releasing albums and competing for holiday sales. Among the inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were the late George Harrison, Jackson Browne, and Prince (seeBiographies), who also had critical and commercial success with his album Musicology.

Musicians who died during the year included soul icon Ray Charles, country singer Skeeter Davis, Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone (John Cummings), session guitar legend Hank Garland, and Jan and Dean member Jan Berry.